20.01.2012 - Topography and albedo image of Caparronia crater

These Dawn FC (framing camera) images show Caparronia crater, after which Caparronia quadrangle is named. The left image is a brightness image, which is taken directly through the clear filter of the FC and shows the brightness and darkness of the surface. The right image uses the same brightness image as its base but then a color-coded height representation of the topography is overlain onto it. The topography is calculated from a set of images that were observed from different viewing directions. The various colors correspond to the height of the area. The white and red areas are the highest areas and the blue areas are the lowest areas. Caparronia crater is the large crater in the center of the images. It is a distinctive, irregularly shaped crater with a degraded rim. The base of Caparronia crater contains a linear ridge, which stands out clearly in the color-coded height image as a pale blue (i.e., higher) ridge on the dark blue (i.e., lower) base of the crater. This feature is possibly the result of material slumping into the center of the crater. The color-coded height image also shows the relatively steep slope on the eastern side of Caparronia crater because the colors change from red (i.e., higher) along the rim to dark blue (i.e., lower) in the base.

These images are located in Vesta’s Caparronia quadrangle and the center of the image is 38.0 degrees north latitude, 166.7 degrees east longitude. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained this image with its framing camera on Oct. 23, 2011. This image was taken through the camera’s clear filter. The distance to the surface of Vesta is 700 kilometers (435 miles) and the image has a resolution of about 70 meters (230 feet) per pixel. This image was acquired during the HAMO (high-altitude mapping orbit) phase of the mission. The images are lambert-azimuthal map projected.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington D.C.. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The Framing Camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA/JPL.